A statistical machine translation (MT) system may include a noun phrase/prepositional phrase (NP/PP) translation subsystem to translation NP/PPs as a subtask in an MT operation. The NP/PP translation subsystem may use a model trained on an NP/PP corpus and a decoder to generate an n-best list of candidate translations and a re-ranker to re-rank the candidate translations based on a machine learning method and additional features based on known properties of NP/PPs.